The dwarves of Doomtrench all apparently have little memory to speak of, horrible intuition, an absolute inability to focus, and no patience at all... Why this? Well, they, erhm, forgot to take about 500 points worth of stuff with them from the embark screen, so now they are close to starving, midway through the first summer. The batch of migrants that doubled their number didn't help the matter. All surface plants have been designated for picking, and all seeds are planted, but we'll get no yield from the helmets before the second spring. The two tuskoxes is our last resort, if we have to brew all the plants.
"Luckily" we embarked on a relativly flat volcano, so we have magma, clay and sand, and thus a means to buy out pretty much the entire caravan when it arrives. Our head potter, who, incidentally, is not named harry, and his three apprentices are already working on it.
Furthermore, the work of making accomodations and workspace is progressing somewhat slowly, due to excessive overseer "aetheticism". Lets build an above-ground fort he says. Oh, wait, lets DIG an above-ground fotrtress, he adds. We haven't even begun work on the trench/quarry that were supposed to be our namesake yet...
EDIT: Tragedy strikes in the still trenchless Doomtrench. Our hastily prepared earthwork defences was promptly ignored by a giant wasp worker, which proceeded to kill two of my beards before a third one remembered that picking up the axe i assigned her was a good idea, if one wanted to survive. We now number 17. The fallen were given hasty, improvised, but still proper dwarven funerals, being interred in stone coffins that afterwards were submerged in magma.
With the ground picked bare, and all animals slaughtered, we should be able to last till winter. We even have named soap, thanks to the butchering of the previously mentioned wasp, which was named for its accomplishments.
